This podcast speaks to a subject I’ve written about a lot lately — the demographic movement of Americans leaving the big cities for small cities and small towns. New York City alone has lost over 300,000 residents since the onset of the corona virus. John Boone and Hunter Renfro are the young principals at Orchestra Partners, a real estate investment company working to rehab old neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama, (pop. 212,000) and elsewhere in the south. Neither of them are trained architects or urban planners, nor are they card-carrying New Urbanists, but they’re working very much in that vein and have a lot to say about creating towns and neighborhoods that are worth living in and worth caring about.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.